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In This Issue

• Dino-Battle Site Un-Earthed on Philosophy Lawn
• Columbia Bioengineers Make Über-Children for a Brighter West Harlem
• How Thinking Hurts America
• Columbia Makes Valuable Contributions to World
• Letters to the Editor
• North Korea: Major Source of Diabetes
• Frontiers of Soul-Crushing Disappointment... and Science
• If I Don't Get Good Housing, People Are Going to Die
• CS Class For The English Lass
• Science Update
• Poetry 4 Physicists
• Porn Older Than Nana
• Fed Science Fair: Cigarettes Are Bad for Kids and Animals
• Wacky Fun Whitey!
• How Many Licks...
• How to: E-Z Bake Thermonuclear Warhead
• Variations of a Sheep
• Marauding Interviewer
• How Many Licks, Vol. II
• The Staff of 20.6
• THEY Watch

The first ever slow motion replay. And Princeton scores again. And again. In slow motion...

If you have ever received an e-mail at five in the morning letting you know that your seventeen hundred dollar e-bill-which the administration, for some reason, sends to you instead of your parents-is ready for viewing, while you were in the process of checking to see if your professor had responded yet to your 3:00 am request for an extension so that you could stop banging your head against your desk in the hope of causing five more pages of a paper to fall out of your brain, then you may sometimes ask yourself: What has Columbia ever done for me?

Having produced sixty-four Nobel Prize winners, Columbia likes to think of itself as an institution that has contributed a lot to the world. But to the average student, these valuable contributions, more often than not, remain a mystery. While many people know that it's thanks to research done at Columbia we, Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, and Iran have or soon will have weapons capable of vaporizing entire cities and creating dangerous lizard monsters, fewer are aware of the many other useful things that have been developed at our Alma Mater. To remedy this problem, I bring you the following uncomprehensive review of the things invented at Columbia.

The Euro
    On New Year's Day, 2001, the world said goodbye forever to deutschmarks, guilders, and pesetas. Thanks to the work of Columbia economics professor Robert Mundell, "the intellectual father of the euro" and frequent Late Show With David Letterman guest, Europeans have yet another thing to be snooty about-a currency that is not only worth more than ours, but is also more colorful. Euro bills range in color from fuscia to fromage yellow to Finnish-weather grey. Now that Prof. Mundell's brainchild is kicking the dollar's butt, it looks like that cheap trip to bum around Europe that you had been planning on after graduation may be a bit out of your price range, and Europeans may have fewer Americans to practice spitting upon.

Machine Grading of Standardized Tests
    We all had to fill out those bubble sheets in grade school and for the SATs. Who doesn't have fond memories of checking to make sure everything is bubbled in thoroughly, only to realize that you skipped a question and have consequently bubbled all the wrong answers? We will probably never be sure how many high school seniors missed scoring an 800 on the 2001 Civics SAT II because, due to incomplete erasure, they were counted as answering that Pat Buchanan was Democratic presidential candidate in the 2000 election. What we do know, though, is that not only has machine grading given a big boost to the number two pencil industry, but it has also made testing a lot more enjoyable by allowing students to amuse themselves by trying to create pleasing patterns with their bubbles or spell out dirty words using only the first five letters of the alphabet. This is all thanks to Benjamin Wood, head of the Columbia University Bureau of Collegiate Educational Research, who came up with the idea in the twenties to develop an automated test scoring method to replace the "acres of girls" who had to do the job before. And who doesn't prefer a sleek, efficient machine to acres of girls?

Beat Poetry
     Next time you're in a dimly lit café at 6:00 pm, trying to nurse a hang-over with your fifth cup of coffee, and you find yourself having to listen some guy in a beret going on about how "the streets wept like the young men awakened naked in gym class, with the fury of the serpent slithering, mad with marijuana and bebop, over my boyfriend's buttock," ask yourself, "Where did this guy get the idea that this was cool?" That idea was invented at Columbia back in the late forties, when a group of Columbia students got together and decided that, while going to Columbia sucked, babbling on about your crazy friends and your drug-induced bad hygiene/nudity was cool. Now, even I don't mind some Allen Ginsburg on a good day, but I can't help being annoyed at him and his buddies for making every skinny drunk who finds himself in a café and capable of snapping his fingers think he's a poet.

Televised Sports
    On May 17, 1939, Columbia initiated the great American tradition of televised sports by losing a baseball home game to Princeton on national television. Granted, national television at the time meant about 400 households, but over time this number would grow, and more and more people would get to watch their team beat Columbia. Eventually, this seemingly innocent broadcast would mutate into monstrosities like Super Bowl Night, when not only people who don't like sports, but even people who don't like commercials, have to watch TV, if only for the commercials. While sports was once about being outside, eating a hotdog, and possibly catching/getting hit by a ball, now it's at least half about watching statistics flashed on a screen. Statistics? You can just hear the crowds of English majors running away from sports for a life as fat English majors. Thanks to the efforts of people like Columbia alum Roone Arledge, inventor of "slow motion" and the "instant replay," TV sports bears almost no relation to real sports. Slowing the action down? Repeating what we've already seen? I think I'm about to fall asleep in my bowl of pork rinds. Now people around the world can get the sports experience without leaving their couches. Ain't technology grand?